In a Time of Trump, Millennial Jews Awaken to Anti-Semitism [View all]

[KamaAina]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/donald-trump-anti-semitism-young-jews-214314

For younger Jews in the United States, that era has suddenly passed. The early months of 2016 brought in a strange tide of online hate speech aimed largely at Jewish journalists who had published articles critical of Trump or his campaign, with all the old ugly epithets on display. Then in July Trump’s Twitter account posted an image of a six-pointed star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, with a pile of money in the background. Though he deleted the tweet, afterward Trump walked up to a brightly lit podium and defended the image, bellowing that the Jewish star was not a Jewish star. A dim reality descended on American Jews. Yes: Trump had broadcast the message of a neo-Nazi without apology.

Then: Weeks of quiet, lasting into August. But the issue roared back into view in September, when the ex-wife of Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, said that Bannon had kept his daughters out of a school because he there were too many “whiny” Jewish brats there; the candidate’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted someone described as the neo-Nazis’ “favorite academic”; and a Trump advisor was accused of discriminating against Jewish employees (and denying the Holocaust). Then Don Trump, Jr., with unblinking casualness, stumbled on an odious analogy. “The media has been (Clinton’s) number one surrogate,” Donald, Jr. complained, not unlike a whiny brat, during a radio interview in Philadelphia. “If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber.”...

But while his parents deliberate, it’s 19-year-old Zach Reizes who is most firm in his views. “What Trump has brought to the surface is, in many ways, the first blatant anti-Semitic experience for the vast majority of American millennials,” says Zach, an angular and handsome sophomore at Ohio University. On campus, he’s active both with AIPAC, the right-of-center bulwark of Jewish politics, and J-Street, it’s younger and left-leaning rival. “My little sister,” he adds, thinks that Trump “is the Haman of the Purim story.”

This year, Reizes and his peers have watched the situation deteriorate: Headshots of journalists superimposed in concentration camps; calls to Jewish reporters in the middle of the night playing Hitler’s voice; white supremacists who appended parentheses around the names of Jews online. Recently, a feature by POLITICO on white America won its author fresh opprobrium as a “Marxist kike.” The anonymous stalker’s Twitter avatar, Pepe the Frog, has become a symbol of the white nationalist alt-right—named this week by the Anti-Defamation League as an official hate symbol—and an image that Donald Trump himself once broadcast, amplifying the dog whistles of a more innocent era into something akin to a trombone blast.